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The Doctor's Daughter (TV story)
The Doctor's Daughter 'is the sixth episode of the fourth series of ''Doctor Who. It was written by Stephen Greenhorn, directed by Alice Troughton and featured David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, Catherine Tate as Donna Noble and Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones. Overview To be added Synopsis The TARDIS whisks the Doctor, Donna and Martha to the planet Messaline, a world where a savage war is being fought between humans and a race of humanoid fish. In the ensuring confusion of their arrival, Martha is abducted by the Hath. Rescuing Martha becomes the Doctor and Donna's main priority as well as attempting to put a stop to the ugly war that has consumed the planet. But that would have been complicated enough had it not been for the fact that the Doctor had suddenly been made a father again... Plot As the Doctor struggles to get the TARDIS under control, it finally comes to a thudding halt and lands. Stepping outside, the Doctor, Donna and Martha find themselves in a large, barren tunnel with barricades and piles of scrap littered all around. Before they can say anything else a trio of soldiers wielding weapons come along and shove the Doctor's arm inside a large machine. Taking a sample of DNA from him, the machine releases him and a larger machine connected to it opens up, revealing a slim, blonde woman who is immediately armed. The Doctor stares at her with wild astonishment as he casually states that she's his daughter. She joins the other soldiers at arming a barricade and, while the Doctor explains where she came from and how she was made, a squad of humanoid-fish creatures storms the tunnel and fire on them. Two of the soldiers are gunned down and in the continued firefight, Matha is grabbed by their assailants. The Doctor hasn't time to reach her before his 'daughter' blows the tunnel. After he chides her for doing so, the other soldier, Cline, holds them at arms and takes them to his commanding officer General Cobb. On the other side of the collapsed tunnel, Martha awakens next to one of the injured creatures. Doing a quick examination, she resets it's dislocated shoulder and earns it's favour, along with that of the others and follows them back to their camp. Meanwhile, in the human camp, Donna, the Doctor and his daughter, who takes the name Jenny from the word 'generated', meet General Cobb, who explains their history at war with the Hath, a conflict which has been rampaging for apparently countless generations. While Martha is shown the map of the entire city, Cobb shows the Doctor the same map in the human camp and he expresses an interest in using it to find the Source, a mythical item which he claims will entitle one side to decide the destiny of Messaline. Using his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor uncovers a compressed section of map on the projector, revealing a large complex of routes to the area where the Source is located. However, in the Hath camp, the map reveals the same routes on their projector. As the human soldiers start moving out, the Doctor tries to persuade Cobb to stop the conflict by just not fighting, but he declares that the war will only end once the source is found and he has the power to exterminate the Hath completely. The Doctor refuses to allow him to commit genocide and Cobb, seeing that he'd stand in his way, orders him, Donna and Jenny imprisoned. Meanwhile, as the humans prepare to march out, the Hath start making their own preparations. The Doctor, Donna and Jenny are thrown in a cell and the Doctor upgrades Donna's phone to get in contact with Martha in the Hath camp where she tells him that the Hath are all marching off to the area that appeared on the map. Knowing that the humans heading the same way will cause a slaughter, the Doctor tells Martha to stay where she is. As the humans prepare to move out, Jenny opts to deal with the guard but the Doctor stops her, insisting that she belongs with them. To prove him wrong, Donna takes the Doctor's stethoscope and listens to Jenny's heartbeat before making the Doctor do the same, revealing to him her two hearts, like a Time Lord; he tells Jenny what it really is to be a Time Lord and about the Time War, causing her to wonder how he thinks they're different. In the Hath camp, Martha is shown a further expansion of the map by her Hath friend, whom she dubs 'Peck' where she sees that she can get ahead of the advancing armies on the surface, but Peck seems to advise against it, showing her the surface levels. She's nonetheless unperturbed. Meanwhile, Jenny lures Clive to the cell and distracts him with a kiss before stealing his gun and getting him to release them. Once they are free, the Doctor attempts to distract the guard covering the way out, but Jenny knocks him unconscious. While the Hath break into the hidden tunnels, Martha and Peck step out onto the surface and head off in the direction of her friends. Cobb finds Clive tied up and orders his people to proceed. The Doctor, Donna and Jenny find the entrance to the hidden tunnel and while the Doctor tries to unseal it, Donna makes a note of a set of numbers like those she'd seen all around the city. While Jenny asks about the Doctor's lifestyle, the human army approaches and they make into the tunnel only to stumble upon a security grid of lasers. While the Doctor tries to disarm them, Jenny opts to go off and hold them up; he tries to dissuade her from killing, citing his own experience of what it does to a person, but she still runs off to hold them up anyway. As she confronts Cobb, gun primed, instead of killing him, she fires at a cable above him. The Doctor manages to shut off the grid and he and Donna make it to the other end of the corridor but they rearm as soon as Jenny gets them. Knowing the Doctor can't disarm them again, Jenny ditches her weapon and gets past the lasers with a combined string of flips, to the other's astonishment. They leave as Cobb arrives, the Doctor promising to stop him from getting the source if it is a weapon. Up above, Martha and Peck continue their trek along the surface when the ground gives way beneath Martha's feet and she falls into a swamp and starts to sink. When Peck can't reach her, he jumps in himself and pushes her to safety, only to disappear below the surface himself to his apparent death, watched by a dispairing Martha. In the tunnels, Donna suggests to the Doctor that Jenny come with them after Cobb is stopped and she runs off, excited. However, after she's gone, the Doctor reveals his history of parenthood, thinking back at what he'd lost every time he looks at her and thus revealing why he finds being in her presence so difficult. As Cobb and his men get past the laser grid, they find the door to the 'temple', break inside and seal the soldiers out. At the same time, Martha makes it there and enters through another door. The Doctor, Donna and Jenny find that the temple is, in reality, the ship the first human colonists arrived in. They find a terminal with the mission log that reveals that the humans and Hath arrived together but the mission commander died and a power vacuum split both humans and Hath into warring factions. Donna spots another sequence of numbers beside the terminal and realises that it and all the numbers she'd previously seen before were the dates that each section of the city were completed. She then tells the Doctor that the first number she'd seen ended in 17 and the one on the screen, the contemporary one, reads 24, meaning that the entire war began only a week ago. By generations, Cobb had been counting every individual to come out of the machine and died in the war to be a generation that kept obscuring the legend of the Source with every generation. After bumping into Martha on a lower deck, they wander into a giant, artifcial garden with the Source, a simple terraforming device sat on a plinth in the center. The two armies break inside and the Doctor holds them at a ceasefire, explaining what the Source really is to them and what it's for. He removes the glass sphere from the plinth and thrusts it at the ground, smashing it and releasing all of the chemicals inside, freeing them to terraform the world above. While the armies put down their arms, Cobb moves to shoot the Doctor and Jenny takes the bullet. She falls dead in the Doctor's arms and he insists that they just have to wait for her to revive, but Martha insists there's not enough Gallifreyan biology in her for a regeneration. Placing her body on the ground, the Doctor picks up Cobb's gun and holds it to his head but just announces to the rest of the soldiers that the foundation of their new society at peace with one another should be in Jenny's memory, as dictated by 'a man who never would'. Later, after Cobb is arrested, Clive and the Hath oversee a proper funeral for Jenny. Returning to the TARDIS, the Doctor figures that Jenny's creation was the reason they'd been brought to Messaline in the first place. However, they arrived too soon and created Jenny themselves, making the events leading up to her creation a causal loop. At Martha's request, the Doctor takes her back to Earth and they say their farewells before going their separate ways. Back on Messaline, Clive and a Hath cover Jenny's body when the chemicals of the terraforming suddenly enter her and she abruptly revives. Despite Clive's attempts to stop her, she jumps in a shuttle and leaves the planet with plans to save worlds, defeat monsters and have "an awful lot of running to do". Cast * The Doctor - David Tennant * Donna Noble - Catherine Tate * Martha Jones - Freema Agyeman * Jenny - Georgia Moffett * Cobb - Nigel Terry * Cline - Joe Dempsie * Hath Peck - Paul Kasey * Hath Gable - Ruari Mears * Carter - Akin Gazi * Soldier - Olalekan Lawal Jr Crew To be added References To be added Story Notes To be added Continuity To be added Home video and audio releases To be added External Links * Official ''The Doctor's Daughter'' page on '''Doctor Who Website